Backstage pass

If you want to do well in your chosen field, there is no substitute for talent and sweat.

But as California writer and filmmaker Cameron Crowe’s genial memoir illustrates, it helps to be born into the right place and time.

Crowe, now 68, has had a solid career as a writer and director of many movies, from Fast Times at Ridgemont High to Jerry McGuire.

But he is best remembered by boomer music lovers for his teenaged writing stint at Rolling Stone magazine, the fictionalized subject of his 2000 movie Almost Famous.

Crowe was 13 in 1970 when his parents relocated from Palm Springs to San Diego, an easy bus ride from the music industry centre of Los Angeles.

He had two older sisters who bred in him a love of pop music. He also had a progressive and formidable mother who expected big things, preferably law school, from her bright youngest child. When he was seven, she took him to a 1964 concert by a rising star named Bob Dylan.

By junior high, a social misfit who had started kindergarten at age five and skipped two additional grades, Crowe was was taking refuge in rock music, which was at the zenith of its cultural influence in early-1970s California.

He started submitting album reviews to a San Diego left-wing newspaper. Soon he was knocking on the door of San Francisco-based Rolling Stone and mailing clips to his music journalism idol, Creem magazine writer Lester Bangs (“a big galumphing guy with a red Guess Who shirt under a leather jacket”), himself a San Diego native.

Bangs, a curmudgeon in his mid-20s, serves the identical role in The Uncool as his character did in Almost Famous. “Do not make friends with rock stars,” he cautions young Cameron. “I have met you, and you are not cool.”

The meat of the memoir is Crowe having to learn this lesson first hand.

Ninety per cent of the book recounts, in bite-sized chapters, his adventures with the people he meets and the acts he interviews — the Eagles, Kris Kristofferson, the Allman Brothers (who serve as the sanitized model for Stillwater in Almost Famous), Lynyrd Skynyrd, David Bowie and many others.

The candid snapshots set amid the text are each worth the proverbial thousand words.

Every second page, it seems, Crowe is being kicked out of a bar for being underage. On the opposite page he is in dressing rooms being offered drugs, booze and even sex.

He does not partake. He is a nerd, a nice Catholic boy who respects women and listens to his mother.

The Uncool resembles Microsoft founder Bill Gates’s recent memoir of his formative years, Source Code. Of similar age, Gates was another precocious U.S. West Coast nerd born in the right place at the right time.

Crowe did his last cover interview for Rolling Stone in 1978. The subject was Joni Mitchell, who had refused to speak to the magazine since 1971.

“The interview was as intimate and honest as her best work,” Crowe writes, “and still stands today as my personal favourite.”

“All washed up” at 21, Crowe persuaded a publisher to let him go back to high school under cover to write about youth culture. The resulting book, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, became his entrée into Hollywood.

The Uncool begins and ends in 2019, with the opening of the musical version of Almost Famous and the death of his mother at age 97.

Earlier this year, Crowe signed a deal to write and director a biopic of Mitchell. Actors Anya Taylor-Joy and Meryl Streep have reportedly agreed to play Joni in her youth and dotage.

However it turns out, you can bet the movie will be as commercial and upbeat as all of Crowe’s work, including this enjoyable memoir.

Morley Walker is a retired Free Press editor and writer.